“[The Architects] designed the buildings in the character of early 20th-century commercial buildings, with brick facades and red-brick paving on the streets and walkways.” via Dallas Morning News.

There are some days when I really hate architecture.

Here are some more adorable examples of North Texas’ love for early century romanticism and other eclectic vulgarities:

Studio 360 speaks with John Siber and his new book Architecture of the Absurd: How “Genius” Disfigured a Practical Art. You can listen to it here:

I’ll have to admit, when I first started listening to this, the revolutionary in me sided with Kurt Anderson and against John Siber who initially evoked images of the Dean of Stanton Institute of Technology castigating Howard Roark. When he attacks the building of Gehry, he notes “There’s nothing beautiful about the Stata Center, it’s a grotesque hodge-podge of various surface juxtaposed at different angles to one another…” and Anderson, rightly, challenges him by comparing the subjectiveness of his argument to the works of Gaudi. However, it immediately became clear to me that Anderson sees architecture with the sophistication of a Mac user criticizing the iPod. He’s already a convert. This interview felt annoying like a pre-John Stewart episode of Crossfire with the right-wing Paladians vs. the left-wing Gehryites.

I find it tiresome how many people like Gehry’s architecture simply because they think they are supposed to.

I reject Gehry’s architecture. Definitively and without reservation. Siber is correct, you marvel at, say, the Disney Opera house…that is…until you walk around the side and see the curving forms of the ‘facade’ are actually galvanized steel pole billboards clad in zinc and masking a boring, largely rectilinear building. The essence of architecture is a reconciliation of interior function and exterior form and presence. In this respect, his Vitra Museum at least makes the statement to embrace the former and completely reject the latter. It creates incredible interior spaces and functions, but at the cost of ignoring any sort of reconciliation with the facade which merely “is” as a result of the interior and sacrifices all its identity to that end.

In contrast, I also firmly reject that beauty cannot be “grotesque”, a “hodge-podge”, or a “juxtaposition of different angles”. I haven’t read Siber’s book, but I certainly hope he is vastly more sensible in his articulation of beauty therein.

Architecture is artistic, but it is not art. Art can exist wholly for itself and for no other reason. It can be as expensive and structurally complicated as wrapping a capital building in canvas, or as inexpensive and simple as painting “R. Mutt 1917″ on a urinal. Architecture is not that, and cannot be that so to consider it as being bound by similar rules of subjectiveness is equally as improper as attempting to define what beautiful architecture “is”.

“His strategy is not to reject either trend outright but to locate each one’s hidden, untapped potential, or as he puts it, “to find optimism in the inevitable.”” New York Times, which you can read here.

We simply haven’t seen utopian design manifest itself at this scale since the 60s, and with what is going on in the Persian Gulf states is truly an brilliant canvas for testing theories of community in remarkable new ways.

“Welcome to Studio 804, the senior graduate design/build studio at the University of Kansas’ School of Architecture and Urban Planning. This class is a final challenge for third-year graduate students pursuing a professional master’s degree in architecture.” via The University of Kansas website article which you can view here.

“Studio 804 is a design/build program at the University of Kansas School of Architecture and Urban Planning. As a final, single semester comprehensive experience, Studio 804 provides students with critical knowledge that prepares them for their future work as young architects in a rapidly changing and challenging profession. The vehicle used for this exhaustive experience is the design and development of an affordable building during which students explore and develop architectural solutions which promote efficiency, sustainability, and creative us of materials…For the students of Studio 804, designing and building what should become the greenest building in Kansas means incorporating solar panels, shading louvers, 30-foot-tall wind turbines, a green roof, as well as gray water and geothermal systems into their structure — a feat that would challenge even veteran architects and builders.” via the Studio 804 website which you can view here.

You can track the progress of this project here. The studio Professor is Dan Rockhill and his firm website is here.

Lebbeus Woods has an excellent entry in his blog concerning the design he proposed for the Electrical Management Building in Sarajevo contracted against what was actually build and the dichotomy of theory and reality that created. The above images document this and I encourage you to read the entry for yourself here.

I consider Lebbeus Woods to be one of the most innovative and prolific architects of our time. His projects were instrumental in my design thought process through school in the 90s and their principles continue to make me constantly question why things are as they are, and why they cannot be what they should or could be. In particular, the “scab architecture” design philosophy he incorporated into his designs for the reconstruction of war torn Bosnia was, for me, a powerful personification of architecture as something more than just form. It told me that architecture could fist accommodate the function of its intent, but then also heal a population while still allowing the palimpsest of history to come through. Architecture should not obliterate, it should evolve. Design should be organic, not absolute.

I can’t say that I’ve been able to adhere to these principles myself. A mixed-use development I designed for Garland, TX is going to be an amazing catalyst to help revitalize a historic downtown, but to do that, we’re occupying a site that had been the home of a mid-century modern courthouse. I’ve a soft spot for this sort of architecture, even if it isn’t a paragon of design. This building wasn’t prolific in any way, but it did exist and it was nice. They demolished it in November, but before that I took a few photos. It’s a shame that more “scab architecture” doesn’t take place, design that continues and evolves, not destroying and replacing.

“Worldprocessor is an ongoing project that started in 1988. Globes reflect data available and valid at the time of their origin. Currently there are over 300 different globes.” via Worldprocessor.org website. You can view the complete catalog here.

I saw this exhibition last year and was very intrigued. While definitely a statement of social consciousness, it isn’t overbearing in it’s message. While it can be critical, it’s primary aim is clearly to inform and give knowledge by using the earth (via the globe form) to communicate not just a theme, but to give that notion perspective and scale. The exhibition is well done, very simple yet quite profound. If you have a chance, I urge you to experience it.

Refugee Currents ++++ Pollution + Satellite Blind Spots ++ Military Spending

“Freeform shapes in architecture is an area of great engineering challenges and novel design ideas. Obviously the design process, which involves shape, feasible segmentation into discrete parts, functionality, materials, statics, and cost, at every stage benefits from a complete knowledge of the complex interrelations between geometry requirements and available degrees of freedom. Triangle meshes – the most basic, convenient, and structurally stable way of representing a smooth shape in a discrete way – do not support desirable properties of meshes relevant to building construction (most importantly, “torsion-free” nodes). Alternatives, namely quad-dominant and hexagonal meshes tend to have less weight, and can be constructed
with geometrically optimized nodes and beams. However, the geometry of such meshes is more difficult. Especially challenging
are aesthetic layout of edges and the geometric constraints of planar faces and optimized nodes.”[1]

I am becoming increasingly impressed with the synthesis between mathematics, geometry and advanced architecture. I’m quite jealous of these architecture kids coming out of school, wielding hardcore coding and programming skills as part of their design arsenal. As buildings become more complex, and designs achieve more freedom in their form, the line between architect, programmer and mathemetician is going to be as blurred as the line between artist and architect [Le Corbusier] or architect and engineer [Calatrava] has been in the past.

Some of the members from this research team did a similar presentation at Siggraph the year before as well. You can find my blog post on it here.

You can view the website of the project lead Dr. Helmut Pottmann here. You can view the published paper on the subject here. You can view a video excerpt from the presentation here.

“In actuality it’s a design by French architecture firm R&Sie(n) for a Swiss ice museum (which sounds only a little less weird than a Yoda RP house). The intended manufacturing process is quite fascinating: head architect Francois Roche managed to locate a special 5-axis CNC machine that can work a 5-meter by 40-meter area, and the museum will be constructed on-site, slice by slice. The raw materials for the slices will all come from locally-harvested trees.”

Via core77 which you can see here.

“Self organisation is all around us. We observe all kinds of self organising patterns in flora and fauna. Also many IT applications nowadays involve self organisation, for example, swarms of robots, computer clusters, artificial life applications, etcetera. Recent research in AI looks at the analysis and design of collective intelligence within such groups of entities. Evolution, learning, social interactions and other adaptation mechanisms make such intelligence possible.”

Via the DECOI 2007 website which you can view here.

These are simply amazing. You can view the photographer’s website Stuck In Customs here. The entry with the New York images is here. You can view his Flickr page here.